Overview
Sharing your faith is hard enough, but successfully convincing others to accept Christ as their savior, or even to just come to church with you to learn more about him, is a daunting task.
Many nonbelievers cite the church’s history of persecution or other malfeasance as reasons for staying away. To be fair, organized religion has not always demonstrated Christ’s love to nonbelievers. Much like other institutions, it is comprised of flawed human beings who are also in need of God’s grace.
But as individual Christians, we are presented with opportunities each day to show Christ’s love by helping others. Such helping may even change nonbelievers’ views of Christianity and bring them one step closer to experiencing the full love and grace of Jesus Christ.
Many nonbelievers cite the church’s history of persecution or other malfeasance as reasons for staying away. To be fair, organized religion has not always demonstrated Christ’s love to nonbelievers. Much like other institutions, it is comprised of flawed human beings who are also in need of God’s grace.
But as individual Christians, we are presented with opportunities each day to show Christ’s love by helping others. Such helping may even change nonbelievers’ views of Christianity and bring them one step closer to experiencing the full love and grace of Jesus Christ.
The Experiment
We recruited 600 nonreligious people (i.e., agnostics, atheists, or non-religious) from the online research platform, Prolific, to test whether helping others increases evangelism outcomes, specifically nonbelievers’ reactions to Christianity, their desire to learn more about the Christian faith, and their willingness to attend church with a friend.
Participants read a brief hypothetical scenario about a church friend who is looking for people to help or to simply invite to church. Each participant read only one of these scenarios (randomly assigned). Both scenarios are provided below for reference.
Participants read a brief hypothetical scenario about a church friend who is looking for people to help or to simply invite to church. Each participant read only one of these scenarios (randomly assigned). Both scenarios are provided below for reference.
“Imagine that you and a friend are having a conversation over coffee. Your friend mentions that they're attending a Christian church in your community and is trying to invite others to church more often. Your friend asks you if you would like to attend a church service or if you know anyone else in the community who may want to attend.”
“Imagine that you and a friend are having a conversation over coffee. Your friend mentions that they're trying to help others more often since they've been volunteering with a Christian church in your community. Your friend asks you if there's anything you need help with, or if you know of anyone in the community who could use some extra help or care.”
Participants typed their response in an open textbox below the scenario, then responded to three survey questions measuring our outcomes of interest. These survey questions were as follows (all on 1-7 scales):
- “How positive or negative is your reaction to Christianity?” (1 = Very Negative, 7 = Very Positive).
- “How interested are you in learning more about Christianity?” (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very interested).
- “How likely are you to attend a church service with your [church/helping] friend?” (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very likely).
Results
Helping may indeed boost evangelism outcomes, but it will likely be more subtle and over the long-term. Nonbelievers’ reactions to Christianity were much more positive when the church friend sought to help others (avg. = 3.67) relative to just inviting them to church (avg. = 3.07), a 20% increase on our 1-7 scale (p < 0.001). However, we found no such effects on nonbelievers’ desires to learn more about Christianity (p = 0.992) nor their likeliness to attend church (p = 0.921). The graph below illustrates these results.
On average, nonbelievers did not seem too inspired to learn more about Christianity or attend church with the helpful friend. But perhaps helping has a greater impact on those who actually accept the offer of help.
To test this hypothesis, we coded participants’ responses to the friend for whether or not they accepted the friend’s offer of help, either for themselves or others. Analyses revealed that those who accepted help viewed Christianity more favorably (22% more, p < 0.001), were slightly more interested in learning more about Christianity (13% more, p = 0.103), and were significantly more likely to attend church with the friend (43% more, p < 0.001).
More details regarding our methodology and statistical analysis can be found here.
Conclusion
Sharing your faith is hard. But the testimony of a life that exemplifies Christ’s love for others can help, especially for those in need of help. Our experiment shows that serving others through offering help when and where you can seems to bolster the image of the Christian faith and may even encourage them to explore that faith themselves.
It will likely take more to reverse the declining trend of Christian believers in the U.S. But heeding Christ’s call to love our neighbors more appears to be a great step in the right direction.
It will likely take more to reverse the declining trend of Christian believers in the U.S. But heeding Christ’s call to love our neighbors more appears to be a great step in the right direction.